Can your visitors determine what your company does within 5 seconds of landing on your website? Can they immediately navigate to the pages they intend to visit without much ado? Do you have an attractive yet simple website layout?

Well, if answers to most of the above questions is a ‘no’, this is the right time to revamp and redesign your website.

Your website acts as a 24*7 salesman and possesses the power to act as the most useful asset for your marketing efforts.

Thus, it is extremely necessary that you take the right steps and keep your website updated. While in most cases, a total website redesign is ideal, you might not always have the right resources on hand with you.

If you are one of those, here is an ultimate guide that would help you in increasing your website design on the go.

1. Choose a simple and responsive design

Here is the thing:

Mobile internet traffic accounted for 52.64% of the total global online traffic in 2017.

This is an important number and is surely expected to grow bigger year by year. If your website is not mobile-friendly, you are surely going to lose out on your customers.

Thus, the best practice here is to not only design your website responsive but also adopt a minimal and simplistic approach. It is highly recommended to choose flat and simple designs over overly-artistic webpages.

Make it a point that you attract your clients and customers with your products and services and not with the flashy looks of your website.

2. Make way for easy navigation

There is nothing worse than having a poor navigation interface. Simply put, your customers are not going to stay with you if they need to invest more than a minute to browse from one page to another. Instead, they will quickly bounce off and switch to your competitor with a better user interface.

The best way here is to avoid giving them too many options – keep it simple and sleek, and within their reach.

It is always a good practice to stick less important pages like privacy policy, terms and conditions, disclaimers and other pages of similar nature to the footer.

Thus, to increase interactions and generate more traffic, make sure that your user does not have to really hunt for anything on your website.

3. Ensure that your contact details are easy to find

Having easy to find contact details is a must, especially if you run an e-commerce store.

Including contact details on your website not only make it easy for your customers to trust you but also enable them to contact you in case of any queries/grievances and feedback.

Thus, it is highly recommended to ideally include contact details in the footer of every page, and at least flaunt them on the main page and the important landing pages.

4. Have clickable banners and logos

Make it easy for your users to navigate back to your home page without any stress.

One of the best ways to do so is by making clickable banner and logos which would redirect the users to your homepage. This just makes finding information and navigation on the site a whole lot easier.

5. Include calls to action

Once the users are on your website, make it easy for them to figure out – what’s next. Give them a sort of direction by placing calls to action strategically on your website.

Call-to-action buttons indicate a user as to what they should do next, and further, also give you a chance to connect with your potential leads.

However, it is not just the placement of call-to-action button that helps, but you should also make sure that you are not spamming your website with the same CTAs all over.

The best way to avoid this from happening is by conducting a quick check of all your web pages, and if the majority of the call-to-action buttons on the website talk about free demo/consultation/quote, then it is the time to upgrade them.

The best call-to-actions educate your users and target their pain points. Once a user relates to your call-to-action, they are more likely to take action and reach you.

Further, to make the most out of your call-to-action buttons, it is always recommended to play with the psychology of color. A recent study conducted by Maxymiser revealed that there is an increment of 11 percent in clicks to a website when they tested their CTAs for varied colors.

The next thing to make note is the action words that you are using. The right words trigger the right physiological action. Some of the best calls to action include download our free ebook, signup for our webinar, watch the video, click for more information, get started and others.

6. Design in shades of gray and then add color

As already said, colors play a vital role in enticing a user. Thus, for the basic frames and visual designs, it is always recommended to stick to neutral shades of gray before you fill in with color.

In the beginning, while designing your website, do the entire styling over grayscale before you create the layout for your photographs and then carefully fill in the colors.

This will allow you to concentrate on the important portions of the website that need to be highlighted. Additionally, this will prevent your website from overuse of bright colors which will only confuse the client and possibly distract them.

7. Choose proper web fonts

Choose proper web fonts so that your content is catchy and clear. Choosing fonts that are difficult to read will only make it complex for your users to read, and even worst, your users might even lose interest after a while.

Long paragraphs of text are difficult to read. Thus, make a judicious selection of fonts so that the key points are easy to read and stand out in rest of the passage.

8. Bury social media icons

You might read at a lot of places to include social media icons on your website. Well, yes, include them! But, after all the hard work, now that the users are finally landing up on your website, would you like them to leave?

This is what you are doing by including social media icons in the header and other prominent places of your website.

The best place to flaunt your social media icons is in the footer. If your target users are on your website, they would like to check your product and services and are least interested in your company’s outing and the likes.

Always note that your social media should drive traffic to your website, and not the other way round!

9. Use white space

A lot of website owners have often complained to us regarding the use of white space, which they believe, can be used for advertising purposes.

Surely, it can be used, but having a white space is a key component of having a good website design.

Simply put, white space makes it easy for your users to read content. As per Crazy Egg, white space can increase user attention by 20%. Further, it can even make your website look attractive and breezy.

10. Boost your page speed

Who wants to wait for a webpage to load? People are running out of patience these days, and if your website takes too much time to load, they would surely switch to your competitor’s website which loads almost instantly.

Need a proof? A delay of 2 seconds in loading a website can lead trigger the abandonment rate by up to 87%!

So, what should be done? Analyze your website for speed with Google’s free service.

In addition, Google will also provide free suggestions which would help you in improving the load speed of your website both on desktop and mobile.

11. Use bullets

Bullets enhance the readability of your website and help users to carefully skim through the content. It is highly recommended to use bullets to highlight the key points.

Additionally, use creative bullet icons to convey your point even more artistically. It is a fast-moving world, thus being short, sweet and precise is the key to it all.

12. Identify 404 and broken links

Imagine you are browsing a website for a few minutes now, and end up landing on a 404 page. What do you do now? It is all about frustration and irritation.

While Google won’t punish you for 404 pages, your users can!

Thus, deliver the best user experience by checking your webpage for any 404 errors and broken links. For this, you can use the Webmaster tools and ensure that there is no crawl error. Furthermore, in case there is a 404 error, make sure that your user is able to return back to your website without much ado.

A sample 404 text should look like – oops, we believe that you are on the wrong page. Click here to explore more!

13. Never stop testing

Even when your page is up and in use, you need to continuously keep a track and test the page for various flaws and how it can be improved. Starting from the font to the content, all can be tested on the basis of the customer response and the number of a certain page is getting.

Run your webpage through a rigorous A/B testing and collect feedback and improve.

14. Choose suitable images

You might be tempted to use stock and royalty-free images for your website as it is the easiest route available. But, as people are getting smarter, they are quick in analyzing and concluding that your website uses generic photos as they might have spotted them on other websites before.

The best way here is to use images as a medium to connect with your customers. You can do so by using real company images. It is important to mention here that while stock photography might look attractive and high quality, it still fails to establish a connection with your target customers.

15. Get found

No matter, how wonderfully designed a website you have, it is all useless until and unless your target audiences can discover your website.

Thus, in order to get found, it is essential to have an SEO strategy in place that would make your website visible in response to certain search terms and keywords.

The best SEO strategies identify the potential keywords and attract the right audiences.